Hi everyone!
Once I became a mother and experienced the complete unconditional love a parent has for their child, I started looking back on my childhood, in particular around my relationship with my father. I can’t shake the thoughts, and Im wondering if I should seek some sort of therapy.
very long story short, I was always a good kid. Then, when I was 13, I moved to a new school and fell in with the wrong crowd. These girls basically bullied me mercilessly for a year, but I was intent on staying “friends” with them because they were popular, and I’d never been popular before (stupid, I know).
anyway, trying to fit in so they’d stop bullying me and the emotional toll put me under extreme stress, so I know I was not pleasant around the house and I was by no means an angel.
I never did anything extremely bad but I would act up in class, I would mouth back to my parents, rarely did my chores and if I did they were half-hearted, and on one occasion I got drunk after drinking 1 single can of cider!
Anyway, my father handled it poorly imo. He would scream at me to the point his spit would fly all over my face, throw things as hard as he could at my face (they were pretty soft, like heavy couch cushions, so it never really hurt that bad), grab me by my collar and shove me up against the wall and scream in my face, say he couldn’t wait until I was old enough to kick me out, or said he would put me up for adoption because he loved me but didn’t like me anymore, called me names like a waste of space and useless etc, read through my private messages, etc.
Now that I have a child (DD 3 years old now) of my own I just physically cannot imagine doing any of these things to her. It’s incomprehensible to me, even if I were extremely angry, I just know that I would never scare her or act like that toward her.
my partner says even now many years later when I go home to visit my parents I get very tense, short, and snappy. After I moved schools and away from those awful girls my behaviour improved as did my relationship with my parents, although my dad always had a very scary and volatile temper.
idk if that’s abusive or not? Especially considering my less than stellar behaviour. But I can’t stop thinking about it, and wondering if it was abusive, how that might still be effecting me now that I’m an adult.